I once had to dig a fire escape from a basement in a health club. It took two weeks.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 May 2018 source ↗
The question
What is the worst job you have ever had?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I once had to dig a fire escape from a basement in a health club. It took two weeks.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 May 2018 source ↗
Scrabbling about under dusty floorboards as an electrician in my early 20s.
I did a terrible job of fixing the downstairs loo once.
Bicycle courier: it was literally dicing with death on a minute-to-minute basis for 12 hours a day. It was terrifying and exhausting.
When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.
Despite a stroke, cancer as a child and various dramas with chainsaws and tractors, the closest was probably when I choked on a lamb chop 25 years ago. Sarah performed the Heimlich manoeuvre and the lamb shot out.
At the time, losing our business, home and all our possessions in 1991 after the failure of our jewellery company. But if that had not happened then other good things would not have happened, either.
A tractor, 12 years ago. Bright yellow and still brilliant.
Getting my 21-year-old knees back.
My children. I was away an awful lot when they were little and not very good at being a father when I was around. I could have done better.
Viv Albertine, Rose Tremain, Siri Hustvedt, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Greg James, Irvine Welsh
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